Cadaver Quotes

“You are a person and then you cease to be a person, and a cadaver takes your place.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“The point is that no matter what you choose to do with your body when you die, it won't, ultimately, be very appealing. If you are inclined to donate yourself to science, you should not let images of dissection or dismemberment put you off. They are no more or less gruesome, in my opinion, than ordinary decay or the sewing shut of your jaws via your nostrils for a funeral viewing.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“I agree with Dr. Makris. Does that mean I would let someone blow up my dead foot to help save the feet of NATO land mine clearers? It does. And would I let someone shoot my dead face with a nonlethal projectile to help prevent accidental fatalities? I suppose I would. What wouldn't I let someone do to my remains? I can think of only one experiment I know of that, were I a cadaver, I wouldn't want anything to do with. This particular experiment wasn't done in the name of science or education or safer cars or better-protected soldiers. It was done in the name of religion.”
― Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

“The early fly gets the cadaver”
― Tim Downs, First the Dead

“A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn’t see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.”
― Jon Ronson, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

“Take it from an old cadaver. Let go of the past.”
― David S.E. Zapanta, Posthumous

“And so, just as the humanity of our cadavers asserts itself in nail polish and tattoos, the inverse of humanity emerges in the body's utter lack of response to profound wounds.”
― Christine Montross, Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab

“A cadaver does not yield the secret to the human experience.”
― Laurence Galian, The Sun at Midnight: The Revealed Mysteries of the Ahlul Bayt Sufis